A week of exploring

So my first week in NZ is over and I have done lots of fun stuff. We spent the first full day here exploring all of the earth quake damage and even felt one our selves. After a few days of paperwork and other not so fun stuff, we went to a little town called Lyttleton (no pun intended...I think). This town is built up the side of a mountain and was damaged a lot by the quakes so we did some service work for them. A couple of us had some fun hauling rubble down the street in buckets and wheelbarrows. The we were treated to fish n' chips at a little place by the harbor. After a very salty and greasy (yumm) lunch, I headed up the hillside to a woman's house that had been cracked by the quakes. The construction teams haven't had a chance to tear down her walls and rebuild them so we bogged ( you know...spackle?) them to keep the rain out of her house.  If you look closely at the little tan house with the red roof that's just above the cemetary...that's the house we helped fix.

After the adventure there we drove to the middle of the island to a tiny town called Springfield at the foot of the mountains. We stayed in a motel called Smily's. It is the place where lots of people from the crew of Narnia and Lord of The Rings have stayed and the man that owns it often finds himself driving Peter Jackson around. We got up bright and early the next day for quite an adventure. We got on a bus and drove into the mountains. You could just feel the Lord of the Rings closing in on you :). We hiked through some hills and got to see where the Maori used to sleep to keep warm. Then we went up to an area where Narnia was filmed and had coffee and cookies. Then we went back down the mountain to a farm where they gave me a yummy chocolate birthday cake and we had a huge lunch. We got to shear a sheep too. Then we went Jet boating on the river that is shown lots of times in LOTR. I wish I would have taken my camera for that. It was a boat that went really fast and skimmed on the water...kind of like a huge jet ski. It was very exciting.

The background of the blog is a picture that I took during our adventures.I climbed up to the top of huge rock and did a spin around for you all so you could get a look at what I was seeing.